Whilst the Womens’ Liberation Movement influenced Goddess spirituality by revisioning womens’ power, bodies and sexuality, Witchcraft, Paganism and magic gained popularity by offering women an alternative spiritual practice, one which referenced nature and the feminine and which viewed sexuality as sacred. The rebirth of interest in Wicca, Paganism and magic grew out of the occult revival that occurred in England and Europe in the late nineteenth century. The occult revival was an eclectic fusion of esoteric and eastern Spiritual Wisdom that witnessed women like Madam Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1890, bringing eastern knowledge of the Tibetan spiritual masters to the west. In California, channelling the spirit world became de rigeur, with a proliferation of mediums bringing through messages from the departed, accompanied by table tilting and ectoplasmic manifestations. The Order of the Golden Dawn, a High Magical secret society was also founded that believed spiritual inspiration could be activated by invocation and ritual focused acts of imagination.
Two figures which emerge into the first half of the Twentieth Century which had a profound effect on modern magic and the practice of Witchcraft are the occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and Gerald Gardner (1884 1964). Crowley is more commonly known for his interests in ritual sex magic and gained the title of “the most wicked man in the world”, often called the Beast. Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a witches’ coven in the 1930s and is thought to be responsible for the revival of what we know today as the modern practice of Wicca or Neo-Paganism. He claims to have been initiated by a witch known as “Old Dorothy” who represented a lineage of authentic witches who could trace their roots back to pre-Christianity.
Gerald Gardner says: "It was the United States in the 1970s that became the centre for modern Paganism and Witchcraft, which energy became channeled into a different phenomenon – the rise of the women’s spirituality movement. As a witch was seen as a modern representation of independent female power, this image was adopted in the United States to become the main source of modern feminist thought and power. Two feminist writers of that era, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English who published Witches, Midwives and Nurses in 1972, put forward that some nine million women were killed in the witch trials across Europe and America from the 14th to 17th centuries, contending that these women had been the healers, midwives and holders of knowledge pertaining to natural medicine and earth wisdom. They believe their destruction had been a desecration of female power and knowledge. (These figures of 9 million deaths are said to have been wildly inflated and contemporary research now suggests figures more like 60,000 witches died)."
Daly (1973) added that the over-throw of prehistoric women-centred cultures had been the beginning of all the world’s ills, calling all women to rediscover their true self in the image of the goddess.By 1978 the first battle of the feminist revolution had begun with its inherent belief in the supremacy of a female goddess and that Witchcraft was the vessel which had preserved the remnants of goddess-centred religion with the sacred status of women in tact.[8] After all, Witchcraft in essence is an earth-based or nature religion and the Great Goddess is its principal deity.
Starhawk at the centre of this burgeoning movement in Los Angeles, wrote that feminist spirituality, Paganism and Witchcraft all overlap but are not identical. Pagans, and even witches may not be feminists. She says:
"Many individuals are drawn to earth-based spiritual traditions, to the celebration of the seasonal cycles and the awakening of broader dimensions of consciousness, without an analysis of the interplay of power and gender. But the feminist Craft has grown enormously, including many men as well as women who are participating in many areas of social and political struggle."
Ronald Hutton explains that Starhawk and Zsuzsanna Budapest were the significant proponents of feminist Witchcraft throughout the 1980s with the goddess spirituality movement fully taking root in the 1990s. This term became an umbrella that included the search for a prehistoric Great Goddess who administered to ancient woman-centred cultures. It also came to represent a movement aimed at recovering female spirituality, and by the late 1990s it signified the spiritual power within women, whether they believed in actual deities or not. Goddess spirituality had formed an identity that was greater than just Paganism or Witchcraft alone, it was a composite that revered the feminine in all its manifestations and in all ages and parts of the world.
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